Adding the universe endpoint ended up being a waaaaay bigger thing than I expected. In order to get universe to work in a timely fashion when all of the cookbooks in supermarket were loaded in, I had to change the encoding used in the database to store complex structures like attributes, metadata, and so forth for things like cookbooks and nodes from gob to JSON. Gob is usually faster than JSON, but in this specific case it isn't. The extreme pain is at least limited to anyone using an SQL backend for this. The README has more information on this change, but the salient part is in this quote from the CHANGELOG:
Breaking DB change: with both MySQL and Postgres, the way data structures
for cookbooks, nodes, etc. has changed from gob encoding to using JSON. This
obviously breaks existing items in the database, so the following steps must
be followed by users using either SQL backend for data storage:
* Export their goiardi server's data with the `-x` flag.
* Either revert all changes to the db with sqitch, then redeploy, or drop
the database manually and recreate it from either the sqitch patches or
the full table dump of the release (provided starting with 0.7.0
* Reload the goiardi data with the `-m` flag.
See the README or the godocs for for information.
That said, it does run better now after this change. Postgres gets more benefits than MySQL does, because it has that JSON type and handy functions for working with JSON, but running goiardi with MySQL gets a boost as well.